Coorabell Hall Film Club
Wednesday 5 February
Young Frankenstein

Food & drinks (Licensed) from 6.00PM
Movie starts at 7.30PM

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN 1974

Lending his cheeky, burlesque touch to 1970s genre revision, Mel Brooks followed his hit  Blazing Saddles with this parody of 1930s Universal horror movies.

Determined to live down his family's reputation, Dr. Frankenstein (co-screenwriter Gene Wilder) insists on pronouncing his name "Fronckensteen" and denies interest in replicating his grandfather's experiments. But when he discovers the tantalizingly titled journal "How I Did It" in his grandfather's castle, he cannot resist. With the help of Inga (Teri Garr) and google-eyed assistant Igor (Marty Feldman), Frankenstein creates his monster (Peter Boyle). Igor, however, steals the wrong brain, and the monster tears off into the countryside where Frankenstein eventually finds him and trains him to do a little "Puttin' On the Ritz" soft-shoe, but the monster escapes again. With his love life with Elizabeth (Medeline Khan) and his experiment in shambles, Frankenstein finally finds a way to create the being he had planned.

Against the studio’s direction, Brooks insisted on shooting in gleaming black-and-white, with sets and props from the 1930s and appropriate fright music. Brooks says he spent a lot of money on white handkerchiefs during shooting. “I gave everybody in the crew a white handkerchief, saying, ‘When you feel like laughing, put this in your mouth.’ Every once in a while, I’d turn around and see a sea of white handkerchiefs, and I said, ‘I got a hit.’”

Young Frankenstein was more than a hit. It is a comic masterpiece – provided you leave any pretense of it being ‘politically correct’ behind.